In Nembhard v. the Queen (1981), 74 Cr. App. R. 144 (P.C.), the court said at p. 146-7 in part: “Nobody, it is said, would wish to die with a lie on his lips. So it is considered quite unlikely that a deliberate untruth would be told, let alone a false accusation for homicide, by a man who believed he was face to face with his own impending death. There is the further consideration that it is important in the interests of justice that a person implicated in the killing should be obliged to meet in Court the dying declaration of the victim- always provided that fair and proper precautions have been associated with the admission of the evidence and its subsequent assessment by the jury. In this regard it will always be necessary for a jury to scrutinize with care the necessarily hearsay evidence of what the deceased was alleged to have said both because they have the problem of deciding whether the deponent who has provided the evidence can be relied upon and because they will have been denied the opportunity of forming a direct impression against the test of cross-examination of the deceased’s own reliability.”
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